Oracle pushes ahead with cloud computing laser focus as earnings slide.--> Oracle has seen a decrease in revenue as the firm continues its attempt to make inroads in the cloud market.
The enterprise software and hardware firm made sales worth $10.7bn during its fourth quarter, down five percent compared with the same period in 2014.
Profit was down year on year by a much larger margin, dropping 24 percent from $3.65bn for the three months ending 31 May last year compared with $2.76bn this quarter.
Despite the disappointing set of overall results, Oracle is clearly making gains in the cloud and SaaS market, benefiting from its oft-repeated 'laser focus' on the cloud computing market.
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd noted during the investor conference call on Wednesday that the firm added 1,217 new software as a service (SaaS) customers over the quarter, while 760 customers expanded their deals with Oracle. In platform as a service (PaaS), Oracle saw better success rates, adding 1,419 customers in Q4.

SF Court Expands E-Filing With One Vendor in Control of Gateway.--> SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - An across-the-board electronic filing mandate takes effect today in San Francisco Superior Court, accompanied by controversy and litigation over the power of a single private vendor to control the court's electronic gateway.
The only private vendor currently able to file directly into the court's electronic file manager - the e-gateway into the court - is File & ServeXpress which holds a hand-me-down contract from Lexis Nexis.
As of today, lawyers must file all civil unlimited papers, after the initial complaint, directly through FSX or indirectly through three "third party filers." Those third party filers had to be approved by FSX, must file through FSX, and must pay for the privilege.
As a result, FSX is the only private outfit that can retail the filing service and it is also the only outfit that can wholesale it. That combination gives it practical control of the gateway.
The market for e-filing in San Francisco, greatly expanded by today's mandate, represents a big pot of money. It is worth roughly $8 million to $10 million a year.

Google has a new secret weapon in war against Microsoft, Amazon--> NEW DELHI: Google is wielding a new weapon against Amazon and Microsoft for cloud computing customers: Itself.
Google is talking more openly about companies that use its cloud business, and revealing more about its computing resources, perhaps the largest on the planet. These include disclosures about Google's ultrafast fiber network, its big data resources and the computers and software it has built for itself.
The aim is to position Google as a company capable of handling the biggest and toughest computational exercises, lightning fast. The disclosures follow earlier moves by Google Cloud Platform, as the search company's cloud computing business is called, to show off its data analysis capabilities.

Launching of Legal Software for Attorneys having E-filing and E courts Feaatures--> We at Proud Legal Launching LEgal Software for Attorneys having E-filing and E courts Feaatures. This software should be worlds best softwware and fulfill requirements of Lawers .We are going to introduce this software very shortly in all Delhi Lower Courts

Diverse allies rally for Microsoft in overseas data fight.--> SEATTLE (Reuters) - Corporate lobbyists, news organizations and academics joined forces with Microsoft Corp on Monday in the software company's legal battle with the U.S. government over access to customer data stored overseas.
The diverse set of interests filed briefs with a federal appeals court in New York, urging it to reverse a judge's order that Microsoft turn over emails from a data center in Ireland. They argued that turning them over would jeopardize the future of international cloud computing.
The case has taken on urgency for tech and media companies in the wake of revelations about bulk electronic data collection by the U.S. National Security Agency from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Technology companies including and AT&T Inc T.N and even rival Apple Inc also filed briefs supporting Microsoft's bid to fend off a government search warrant for the emails.

Gmail blocked in China, Great Firewall suspected.--> BEIJING: Google's Gmail was blocked in China after months of disruptions to the world's biggest email service, with an anti-censorship advocate suggesting the Great Firewall was to blame.
Large numbers of Gmail web addresses were cut off in China on Friday, said GreatFire.org, a China-based freedom of speech advocacy group. Users said the service was still down on Monday.
"I think the government is just trying to further eliminate Google's presence in China and even weaken its market overseas," said a member of GreatFire.org, who uses a pseudonym.
"Imagine if Gmail users might not get through to Chinese clients. Many people outside China might be forced to switch away from Gmail."
Google's own Transparency Report, which shows real-time traffic to Google services, displayed a sharp drop-off in traffic to Gmail from China on Friday.
"We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end," a Singapore-based spokesman for Google said in an email.

Microsoft slates Windows' touch Office for mid-2015--> Among a blizzard of announcements about Office Thursday, Microsoft also snuck in a loose release date for the touch-centric Office it has long planned to ship for Windows.
We will deliver touch-optimized Office apps for Windows with Windows 10," Microsoft said in one of several blog posts trumpeting changes to the Office suite on the iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones and tablets.
Windows 10, which is now in a technical preview, will ship around the middle of next year, Microsoft has said previously.
Touch-based Office apps for Windows -- aimed at touch-enabled notebooks as well as tablets and hybrids like Microsoft's own Surface Pro -- have been on the company's to-do list for more than three years.
In September 2011, then-CEO Steve Ballmer hinted that the company was working on "Metro-izing" Office, telling Wall Street analysts, "You ought to expect that we are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro style."

Microsoft's brilliant move to make money from arch rival Google .--> On Monday, Google made a startling announcement: under a new partnership, Microsoft will let customers move their Windows apps to Google's cloud for free.
It's as if Microsoft said, "Ok, Google, we'll share our customers with you."
The program goes by the name of the Microsoft License Mobility. It basically says that if a Microsoft customer has a support contract, the customer can move certain Windows apps to a cloud with no extra cost.
The software covered includes things like Microsoft's email server, Exchange; Microsoft's database, SQL Server; its videoconferencing and instant messaging server, Lync; its security software, Forefront; and a couple other things. It does not include the full Microsoft Office suite.
This License Mobility program is used to encourage Microsoft customers to try Microsoft's own cloud, Azure. But under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has a new mantra: getting people to use Microsoft software

Microsoft rolls out Delve information and people discovery tool for Office 365..--> Microsoft has begun a months-long rollout of Delve, the first Office 365 application that taps into the suite's Office Graph machine learning capabilities and maps connections between co-workers, documents, and information.
Delve, announced in March with the code-name Oslo, is designed to automatically surface colleagues, files and data that are more relevant and important to users' work.
[ InfoWorld pits Microsoft Office 365 against Google Apps and reveals the best office apps for your iPad. | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies in our Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]
Delve renders these connections via a very visual card-based interface, and bases its output on an analysis of a number of signals and elements from each individual user, such as Exchange Online email message exchanges, OneDrive for Business stored content, SharePoint Online collaboration activity and Yammer enterprise social networking interactions.
In the coming months, Delve will also be able to take into account email attachments, OneNote content and Lync Online IM and audio/video communications. The goal is to make work processes more intuitive to engage with and easier to navigate by highlighting for employees the data and connections they should prioritize. At least in theory, that should help employees focus on their most important tasks, colleagues and documents.

Microsoft's Surface Business Has Lost an Estimated $1.7 Billion since Debut.--> Microsoft is bleeding cash from its Surface tablets and may soon have to consider shutting down the business altogether, Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer wrote in a compelling piece against the Surface.
Keizer did his own back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate that Microsoft has lost $1.73 billion since the Surface’s debut in 2012. The total loss for FY2014 was $680 million, and it was $1.049 million for the year before, according to Keizer.
His calculations also revealed that in the June 2014 quarter alone, the Surface had lost $363 million, the largest quarterly loss for the Surface since Microsoft started releasing quarterly revenue figures.
He said some of the losses was due to massive write-offs from the Surface Mini, which never hit the market despite being ready for production, out of fear it would not sell well.
The loss also included some of the manufacturing cost of the Surface Pro 3, which only started to sell on Aug. 1. Because of its late release, only a small portion of its sales were included in the June quarter’s earnings.
Keizer argued $1.73 billion may not be that big of a loss for a company as big as Microsoft, but it’s still a sizable figure considering it represented 3% of Microsoft’s FY2014 gross margin. He said Microsoft’s year-over-year revenue growth would have been almost 1% had the Surface unit broken even last year.

Events

Visit of Hon'ble Judges and Court Registrars from Federal High Court of Nigeria